A THUNDERSTORM HAD moved across the prairie, with great bolts of lightning that shook the house and left the air heavy with electricity. Mary had stayed at the kitchen table, sipping on a mug of coffee and telling herself that Jesse would be fine out in the pasture. He and Anthony had been caught in storms before. They would know what to do. Maybe head into a dry arroyo and wait. Nothing to do but wait. After the storm had passed, she turned her attention back to the chores. Always the chores. A basket of laundry to fold and put away, the kitchen floor to scrub, butter to churn, dinner to put on the table.
Jesse spent long days out in the high pasture now that Butch and Sundance had gone. Just Jesse and the hired hand left to round up the cattle and herd them down to the lower pastures where they could feed them in the winter months with the bales of hay stacked against the barn. And yet, they hardly spoke. A few nods and grunts, but mostly Anthony stayed to himself out in the bunkhouse. He even carried his meals out there now rather than sit at the table with her and Jesse. She hadn’t minded. It was nice to spend time with Jesse; it eased the emptiness she felt after Butch left.
The Pinkerton agents had returned twice, and it wouldn’t surprise her to see them riding up the road again. They never gave up. Sometimes she had to sit down for a moment to fight off the waves of nausea. At first she had allowed herself to hope there might be a baby coming, but all the hoping and praying did not make it true. For several years now, she and Jesse had accepted the fact there would be no child for them. Not long after they had married she had asked Jesse if she could bring Little Mary home, and he had agreed. Laughing and making plans to raise a daughter, building a small bed out of wood stashed behind the barn. But when they took the wagon to the reservation and found Mary playing with children she thought were her brothers and sisters, happy with her Arapaho family, they had understood the child was already at home. And later that year Mary had lost their child, a tiny, unformed life that had slipped out of her. No, the nausea that came over her now was from the thought of Butch running, running, always running from the stone-faced agents. They would chase him to the ends of the earth. It was only a matter of time until they caught up with him.
She hadn’t told Butch about Little Mary. All the time he was here, she had argued with herself over whether she should tell him. She had tried to imagine what he might do, but she couldn’t form a clear picture. An outlaw on the run? How could he claim a child? And what about Little Mary? Settled in her family. What did she need with a white man she had never heard of? She had decided not to tell him. Their child would stay settled and happy.
But there was something else—a ripple of pain that ran through her every time she allowed herself to think of those past times. Butch, running his own ranch near Dubois. Going straight, living an ordinary life, like the other ranchers. Dancing at the get-togethers, and oh my, how he could dance. All the girls lined up to dance with him, but he had wanted to dance only with her. She, a half-breed, sneered at and looked down upon by the white cowboys, had caught his eye. Her heart fluttered even now at the thought of those days.
He would come back for her as soon as he got out of prison, he told her. Imagine Butch going to prison for stealing a horse that he hadn’t stolen! Justice, she supposed, for all the bank robberies and train robberies he would later get away with. When he got out, he hightailed it out of here without even stopping by to see how she was doing. Without the courtesy of telling her he had to ride on, that some wild restlessness called him and he couldn’t stay. Without even that much, and it had come to her over the years, the painful knowledge that she hadn’t wanted to face: he hadn’t loved her enough.
She lifted herself off the chair and went out to the back porch to churn the butter. She supposed the knowledge would always hurt, but it made no difference. She had met Jesse, another white man who had looked beyond her black eyes and black hair, the brown of her skin, and loved her. So it was for the best, all of it, wasn’t it?
She had started to pour the cream into the churner when she saw Anthony galloping across the lower pasture with a large bundle behind him. She set the metal cream container down, stepped off the porch, and started for the fence, alarm spreading through her, bells clanging in her ears. Anthony dismounted and she saw the boots dangling below the tarp. She was running now, throwing open the gate. “Jesse! Jesse!” She could hear the panic in her voice.
“Best to stay calm.” Anthony grabbed her and tried to pull her back, but she was already yanking at the tarp. Jesse’s face, smashed and bloody, his eyes staring out as if he were examining the haunches of the horse. “Nothing we can do.”
She fought him with all her strength, punching at his iron-hard arms, flinging herself sideways and bucking like a wild horse to get free. “He’s my husband!” she shouted. “Let me go!”
Gradually he let her go. She would not be restrained. “My husband!” she was screaming, and the wild, frantic screams filled her ears.
“It’s too late. Nothing to be done,” he said as she cradled Jesse’s head in her arms, pulled him close against her body.
“Don’t go!” Screaming again. “Don’t leave me.”
“Let’s take him inside.” Anthony started lifting Jesse’s body off the horse. “You take his feet; I can handle the rest.”
And there they were, carrying Jesse through the gate, across the yard and onto the porch, past the butter churner, across the kitchen floor still wet from the scrubbing and into the living room. They laid him on the sofa, his eyes now staring at the ceiling.
Mary knelt down beside him. She had no idea of when she had dropped down. All she could focus on was Jesse, stretched in front of her, one arm dangling over the sofa, fingers touching the floor. She had the sense she was looking at a tintype, an image of someone else. How could this be Jesse? She laid her head against his chest and listened for the familiar heartbeat that had sustained her through the long, dark nights when the sense of loss had pressed down over her.
She was barely aware of Anthony, a blurred image standing at the foot of the sofa, starring down at Jesse. “How could this have happened?” she said.
“The storm came on out of nowhere. Lightning flash spooked the horses, and Jesse’s mount bolted and threw him off. Hard, rocky place.”
“I don’t believe it.” Jesse was an expert rider; he had ridden horses all his life, through all kinds of storms. There wasn’t a horse he couldn’t handle. So what if the horse had bolted? Jesse would have kept control. No horse would throw him.
“You better believe what’s real.”
“He would’ve known what to do.”
“Didn’t have time. It was an accident.”
Mary turned back to Jesse and sank down into her skirts. She picked up his hand, warm but still and lifeless, little smudges of dirt in the creases around the nails. Pieces of the ranch he had built for her. She pressed her lips to his palm. Then she rose on her knees and placed a finger on the top of his right eye and closed the lid. Then the left eye, the way Grandmother had done when Grandfather died.
She waited a long while before she spoke again, conscious of the man stationed like a guard a few feet away. Eventually she said, “We have to notify the sheriff.”
“It was an accident,” Anthony said again. “Sheriff will stir up trouble, ask a lot of questions, want to go out to the pasture where Jesse got bucked. Won’t none of it bring him back. Best thing’s to bury him on the ranch. Sooner better than later.”
Mary felt his eyes sweeping her face. She mopped at the moisture on her cheeks and kept her own gaze on Jesse. The red and black bruises on his face, the black-shadowed eyes, and what was this? A small crater on the right side of his head. It sank in on her then, like an iron pressed against her skin, that, rather than allow her to ride into town and notify the sheriff, the man at the end of the sofa would kill her.
What she couldn’t know, couldn’t work out in her mind was why. What h
ad happened between Jesse and the hired hand? The nervousness she had felt lately, the nausea that came over her out of nowhere—worry over Butch, she knew, but now she understood there had also been something else nagging at her, something as hard to grasp as the electricity after the storm. Jesse and Anthony had seemed to get along well enough—for a man who owned a ranch and a hired hand with no hope of ever owning a spread himself. Anthony did his chores, but now and then, yes, now and then she had caught him staring out over the pasture and, sometimes, even staring at her with such envy in his eyes that it had made her look away. As if the world should make up to him for all the ways in which it had failed.
“I want my family to know,” she managed. “They will help me . . .” Help me grieve, help me find a way to hold this man accountable for Jesse’s death. “Help me bury my husband.”
“I say we bury him now out behind the barn.”
Mary rose to her feet. “My husband is not an animal.” She tried to keep her anger down. A small nerve had started to twitch at the side of Anthony’s face. His hand rode on the holster on his belt. She was aware of being alone, surrounded by nothing but land and air and sky, twenty miles from town, fifteen miles from her family. “Besides, if we buried Jesse like that, the sheriff would hear about it and come out here asking more questions.”
She could see by the way he flinched that she had struck home. He did not want the sheriff coming around; that was her trump card. “I’m asking you to ride over to the rez and tell my people about Jesse. I want to stay here with my husband.” For a moment, she didn’t know if he would agree. Then something in him, perhaps the desire to appear normal and innocent, overrode whatever objections rose in his head.
“You’ll stay here?”
“I just told you.” The man was so easy to read, she felt a chill run through her. A simple man capable of grasping one thought at a time, and that thought was to save himself. “My family will help me bury him,” she said, hoping to dispel any lingering thought of the sheriff.
Anthony took a few steps into the living room, then stopped and glanced about as if he had forgotten something. Finally he strode into the kitchen and out the back door. Mary waited until she heard his footsteps in the yard before she ran to the back door and threw the bolt. Then back to the living room to throw the bolt on the front door. She took the rifle down from the rack, cocked the hammer, and went into the kitchen. Out of the side of the window she watched Anthony head into the barn. He was there for a long time. And doing what? The sorrel stood in the yard, still saddled. He had only to mount the horse and ride away.
She slid the bolt back and stepped outside, the rifle trained on the open barn door. Slowly she made her way across the yard. Afternoon sun, clean and hot after the storm, flooded the barn and outbuildings; thick shadows fell over the ground. Inside, the barn was in half darkness. She had to squint in the sunlight to make out the figure moving about. She moved closer to the door. “What are you doing?” she called, but she could see what he was doing. Packing up his gear, rolling everything he had brought with him into a knapsack that he flung over one shoulder. She kept the gun steady as he came toward her.
“You fixing to shoot me?”
“Not if you ride out of here and don’t ever come back.” She waited a moment before backing outside into the sunshine to give him room.
“Why the hell I’d ever want to come back here.” He fixed the knapsack behind the saddle and, in one smooth move, mounted the sorrel and yanked the reins to the side. The horse trotted toward the house, and Anthony yanked the reins again, directing the horse down the side of the house and out to the ranch road. Mary kept the gun trained on him until he was nothing more than a dark speck in the middle of a dust cloud out on the main road.
She went inside and rebolted the door. Then she sank down on the floor again, next to Jesse, the rifle beside her. She wasn’t sure how long she had stayed with her husband; she would have stayed forever. Time collapsed in her mind, the present and the past all bunched together. The time when Jesse had come courting in such a fancy surrey that she’d had to stifle a laugh. A fancy surrey for the likes of them, a cowboy and a half-breed. He had big plans. He had been saving money for years, he said, and he had enough to get them a stake. A little spread just over the line from the reservation, where she would be close to family. Close to her child, and she had loved him the more for understanding. Working hard on the ranch, hiring hands from time to time, whenever money allowed. But there was never enough money until Butch had come back and insisted she and Jesse take some of his.
She understood everything then. Jesse going to the bank to pay the mortgage, and where did he get all that money? And Anthony going into town and seeing the reward for eight thousand dollars, all for turning in outlaws nobody cared about anyway. The Pinkerton agents riding down the road a few days later. All of it making sense now. Anthony had been set to collect his reward, but Butch and Sundance had gotten away, and he was left with nothing.
She made herself get to her feet and, still cradling the rifle, went outside, taking her time to affirm what she knew was the truth. In the barn she pushed through the dimness to the large chest under the tackle wall and lifted the heavy cover. “Nobody’ll ever think of looking in here,” Jesse had told her when he stuffed the small envelope into the folds of a saddle blanket. She pulled the blanket apart and ran her fingers over the folds until she touched the crisp edges of the envelope. She pulled it out, went back outside, and leaned the rifle against the barn. She opened the envelope and turned it in the sunlight. The map was gone.
30
FATHER JOHN WOKE early, the sun spreading orange and vermilion through the eastern sky. He felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. All the long night, tossing and turning and listening for the sound of a vehicle on Circle Drive, heading down the alley to the guesthouse. And Vicky alone in the little house, the door nothing more than plywood. A sturdy boot could kick it open. Dear Lord. He never wanted her to be hurt, and yet a man who called himself Cutter had tried to rape her. Would have raped her if she hadn’t kicked at the fire. Distracted him, the flames blowing up on the blanket.
At some point in the middle of the night, in the midst of the fear and anger that gripped him, had come the rational, logical, unemotional truth. He could not protect her from the world. She lived in the world, and the world was dangerous. Still, the thought of her alone in the mountains, fighting off an attacker, had sent him back to tossing, getting up again to look out the window and make sure he hadn’t missed the sound of a pickup or car, that no headlights flared in the alley. Thinking that he could go to the house and stay with her. Knowing that if he did, he would never return.
He showered, shaved, and pulled on his blue jeans and red plaid shirt and boots. The house was quiet. It was the bishop’s morning to say Mass, and the old man would be in the sacristy putting on his robes. Father John hurried down the stairs, grabbed his cowboy hat off the peg in the front hall, and set off on the path across the field. Walks-On trailed alongside, bounding through the grass. A couple of pickups pulled into Circle Drive and parked close to the church. The door was open. He could see a few figures bent in the pews. He waved to the elders getting out of the pickups and kept going. Across the drive and down the alley that separated the church from the administration building. The mission grounds quiet, expectant, cottonwood branches crackling in the soft morning breeze, Walks-On running ahead and doubling back.
He stopped. The Ford was gone. Vicky had parked close to the house last night while he had run ahead to open the front door. Now he rapped on the door, not sure what he expected, but wanting to make sure Vicky wasn’t inside, that nothing had happened, that no one had come and taken her car. The knob turned in his hand and he pushed the door open. “Vicky?”
He knew by the vacant atmosphere that she was gone. Still he looked into the kitchen alcove, the bedroom in back. The bed neatly made and only the faintest sage-tin
ted smell of her remaining. Walks-On sniffed around as if he were surprised Vicky wasn’t here. Father John checked his watch as he walked back to the residence. Six thirty. Mass about to start. He wondered when she had driven away. He hadn’t heard her car leave, but the sound had probably mingled with the stutter of the old pickups heading to the church. It made sense she would want to get home and get ready for the court hearing this morning. He retraced his steps down the alley.
The dog leapt ahead of him into the residence, and Father John followed him to the kitchen. The air was thick with the smells of hot oatmeal and fresh coffee. He shook food into Walks-On’s dish and filled his water bowl, aware of footsteps coming up the basement stairs. The soft roar of the washing machine sounded through the floor. Elena pushed the door open. “You sit down,” she ordered. “I’ll get your breakfast.”
“Why don’t you sit down and have breakfast with me?”
“I already ate.” She brushed at the white apron tied at her waist. “I don’t need two breakfasts and I got my work to do.”
There was no arguing with Elena. This was her house, her mission, her work, and he had learned it was best not to interfere. He sat down while she spooned the steaming oatmeal into a bowl, poured a mug of coffee, and set them in front of him. “You need a hearty breakfast.” The same pronouncement he had heard every morning since coming to St. Francis.
He poured milk over the oatmeal, sprinkled on some sugar, and dug in. It was tasty and familiar. Not a bad way to start the day, he had decided. When he finished eating, he poured milk into his coffee, sat back, and took a long sip, his mind still racing over last night. Vicky in his office, scared and angry and triumphant all at once, and the photos of the long-ago fifth graders at St. Francis Mission School, with James Walking Bear smiling out from the past, a mixture of confidence and sadness in the dark eyes. Cutter’s voice jabbed at his thoughts. My father took us to Oklahoma.
The Man Who Fell from the Sky Page 21